The Daily Glance
Cara Benson's (made) is a poetry book that seems to be in motion, and by that I mean that the poems seem to be collecting various images along the way around the country. It's as if this book is about collecting the fragmented things of the U.S--not really ideas as much as things. The mostly prose poems seem to blend into each other because there are words that are in a larger font. These at first seem like titles listed below the poems, but they occasionally appear on pages without other text, and the poems occasionally appear without them, so they seem more like elements intended to tie the text together. Still, the book seems to work as a collector of things: washers, dryers, leaves, bumper cars, ping pong, apples, roads, tires, milk bottles, kettles, sweaters. She mentions the "cross-country mile," and that's what seems to be happening in this book.
Cara Benson's (made) is a poetry book that seems to be in motion, and by that I mean that the poems seem to be collecting various images along the way around the country. It's as if this book is about collecting the fragmented things of the U.S--not really ideas as much as things. The mostly prose poems seem to blend into each other because there are words that are in a larger font. These at first seem like titles listed below the poems, but they occasionally appear on pages without other text, and the poems occasionally appear without them, so they seem more like elements intended to tie the text together. Still, the book seems to work as a collector of things: washers, dryers, leaves, bumper cars, ping pong, apples, roads, tires, milk bottles, kettles, sweaters. She mentions the "cross-country mile," and that's what seems to be happening in this book.
Rusted shackles drape from a nail in the white plaster wall of garage no. 1. What use they have exerted; now, all these years past, refuted. Tethered to an idea, the long-distance runner will forge into body spasms, permanent condition. The garage houses dated babysauce jars of odd screws and mismatched butterfly hooks.Ultimately, the collected fragments/things add up and suggest a dismal or perhaps just downtrodden world. This world feels like the Rust Belt stretched across the rest of the country. That said, the book is interesting to read and feels like the beginning of a much larger project.
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